Retro Magazine 1

The Gaping Pit?
apparently after an argument over royalty rates. The fact is that Matthew Smith never
wrote a sequel. That job was left to Derrick Rowson.
You can imagine the situation. The fans are crying out for a sequel and the man
behind the series has gone AWOL. Software Projects needed something quick, and the
solution was Jet Set Willy II: The Final Frontier. Released in July 1985, just over a year
after the original, part II is best described as an enhanced version of Jet Set Willy.
Rowson took all 60 of Smith’s rooms and added a further 71 rooms of his own,
bringing the total number to 131. New rooms are dotted throughout the house, with
the majority lying in the rarely-explored area beyond The Forgotten Abbey. However,
the majority of new rooms were not in Willy’s house at all. In the original game, if you
made your way to the very top of the house, and jumped up from The Watch Tower,
you’d be looped back around to The Off License. But in the sequel, you’d appear in
The Rocket Room. This would then take you to a space ship from which you could
beam down to an alien planet.
The main problem with Jet Set Willy II was that the new rooms were largely dull
and boring. The author shared little of Smith’s imagination, and apart from a few nice
touches (Willy in a space suit being one of them), the sequel was something of a
missed opportunity. Crash agreed, giving the game 61% overall and saying “Good, but
not much progress.”
However, the sequel’s greatest strengths lay behind the scenes. Smith has
squeezed every last byte out of the Spectrum to produce the original, and yet Rowson
somehow managed to cram over double the amount of screens inside the 48K
memory. To achieve this, Rowson created a compression algorithm that he used to
scrunch the size of each screen. On the downside, this made the game much harder to
hack, and very few modified versions of the sequel have appeared. ✺✯*
Many rumours surrounded Jet Set Willy, with the main ones relating to
supposed secret rooms. This seems to stem from a reference in Smith’s
original code to a room called The Gaping Pit. Imaginations were on fire
and the whole thing boiled over when Your Spectrum printed this letter
from Robin Daines in issue seven:
“Seeing your article in issue 4 about Jet Set Willy I felt
compelled to write to you about some locations you’ve missed
out. The Gaping Pit seemed the most obvious one, though
even I haven’t visited it. Secondly, and more importantly, you
omitted three major locations; here’s how you get to them.
Wait on the bow till 11.45pm (Smith time), which may seem an awful long time to you
swashbuckling Spectrummers. At that moment, a raft will get tossed up on a large wave and
you must then jump on. It takes you to Crusoe Corner (a desert island to us landlubbers).
Then you shin up a palm tree to arrive at Tree Tops – The Sequel, from which you catch the
bird that travels up towards In The Clouds. From there you can control yourself all over the
house (funny things happen when you try to enter
the water or the Master Bedroom) and from that
point, it should be possible to find The Gaping Pit
(though I’ve not tried it myself). It also clobbers the ‘Attic
Attack’ and makes it possible to go through baddies (fire puts
you down where you are, so be careful) whereupon the bird
disintegrates.”
Your Spectrum countered with a sarcastic reply, about how they
themselves had found even more secret rooms, but this was no doubt lost on
countless readers, who waited and waited for that raft like Crusoe himself.
This hoax became so famous that Derrick Rowson actually included the desert
island in Jet Set Willy II. If you flick the trip switch, and then make it to The Bow
without losing a life, the yacht will take you to The Deserted Isle.
>Surbiton secrets.
• The JSW in-game tune is “If I was a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof,
although the version of JSW that appeared on the They Sold a Million
compilation features In The Halls Of The Mountain Kings from Manic Miner.
JSW II also features the Grieg’s movement.
• There’s a room in JSW called We Must Perform a Quirkafleeg. In case you’re wondering, a Quirkafleeg is an act that involves
lying on the floor and kicking your legs out. It comes from a comic Smith used to read called The Furry Freak Brothers.
• In the original JSW, you would die instantly if you entered We Must Perform a Quirkafleeg after visiting The Attic. It seems that
the large caterpillar messed up some of the graphics, causing the crash. Software Projects released a POKE for this problem,
although they claimed it was part of the game’s design! Apparently, after visiting The Attic, Quirkafleeg filled with deadly gas,
forcing you to find an alternative route.
• In JSW, the screen Nomen Luni is a mikey-take of the Nomen Ludi legend that appeared on Imagine’s plane-shooting game
Zzoom. And if you look at that particular screen, you’ll see that a plane has indeed crashed into Willy’s mansion.
• If you do manage to collect all 83 objects in JSW, Maria will let Willy retire to bed. But as soon as his head hits the pillow, he
dashes to The Bathroom and throws up in the toilet! The ending to JSW II is even more devious, because it transports Willy to
The Central Cavern. That’s right – the first screen from MM. Perhaps it was a recurring dream after all.
• MM, JSW and JSW II were ported to many different machines, with some minor but interesting changes. For instance, the BBC
Micro version of MM completely replaced the Solar Power Generator with a new screen called The Meteor Shower.
Similarly, the Amstrad CPC version changed the layout of Solar Power Generator but the name remained the same.
However, Eugene’s Lair was renamed Eugene Was Here.
• The Commodore 16 version of Jet Set Willy only featured 20 screens, even though it was labelled “Enhanced
Version”. The furthest to the left you could go was the Back Stairway and the furthest to the right was The Bridge. The
C16 version of JSW II included over 80 screens, but the game was a four part multi-load
• The Commodore 64 and Spectrum versions of JSW II were identical, expect that in the C64 port you could jump into
the toilet at the start and visit several additional screens.
• Software Projects commissioned Atari ST and Amiga versions of JSW in 1989. The company later canned both
versions, but the Atari ST version was finished, and has since found it’s way onto the Web. It’s a very faithful remake of
the Spectrum version, although there are two new rooms – Buried Treasure and Zaphod Says: DON’T PANIC!
• Jester Interactive now own the rights to MM and JSW. A jazzed-up version of MM appeared on the GameBoy Advance in
2002, and there are plans to port both games to mobile phones.
**29**